Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Carissa Broadbent (best book recommendations txt) 📖

kill this one. I found her beyond the walls, untouched by the fires. Likely drowned in her own dissolved organs. Slowly.”

His voice was calm and level, but his knuckles were white around the handle of his blade.

“I do not think,” he said, “that this is what the humans wanted to happen. I think that this is a failed experiment. They weren’t trying to destroy. They were trying to create. And what we are looking at now is a Fey caught in-between. Just as Aefe was caught in-between, last night.” His eyes flicked up to mine, bright and furious. “The land itself was corrupted, there. Don’t tell me that you did not feel it as I did.”

I had felt it, seeping all the way down to the core of the earth.

“Whatever they did, it killed their own kind, too,” he went on. “I found a human corpse not far from this one. The same corruption, same disfigurement. But in worse shape. There was not much to salvage.”

Ishqa let out a long breath through his teeth.

“Then what does this tell us but that the humans are ruthless creatures? We already knew that.”

“It tells us a great deal. And perhaps it could have told us more, if we had not torched the city before we could investigate.”

Ishqa’s stare hardened.

“You’re saying that they are trying to create something with Fey magic,” I said. “Fey and human magic melded. And…” I cleared my throat, the next word striking too close to the ones that had been hurled at me just hours before. “…Corrupted, as you call it.”

“I believe so. But I need to learn more to understand why, or how.”

“This is heretic magic,” Ashraia growled. “No Fey scholars would be studying such things.”

It was the truth. The Fey houses were different in so many ways, but one belief they all shared — perhaps the only belief they all shared — was that magic was a gift from the gods. As such, it was a sacred practice, treated with careful reverence, and never, ever to be used or studied blasphemously.

I knew those teachings well, of course. They were the same ones that condemned me for the magic that lived in my veins.

“No Fey scholars,” Caduan said. “But perhaps Nirajan ones.”

My head snapped up. I thought I must have misheard him.

“Nirajan?” I echoed. “You propose we write to Niraja?”

“I propose we go to Niraja,” Caduan said.

I almost laughed, because the thought was just that ridiculous.

Ashraia let out a scoff. “If we were to go to Niraja, none of us would ever be allowed to return home.”

“You say that as if there’s any possibility that we can go there,” Siobhan added. “But even if we wanted to, we couldn’t.”

“Not that I would ever walk into the kingdom of halfbreed traitors,” Ashraia grumbled. “I’m surprised you would want to speak to people who are willing to fuck the creatures that killed your kin. And I’m sure the Sidnee feel even more strongly about it than I.”

On instinct, I flexed the fingers of my right arm — the one covered not with shameful X’s, but my father’s esteemed stories.

Yes. To so much as suggest that we visit Niraja was… well, implausible wasn’t strong enough of a word. It was a small kingdom, an island that lay between the Fey and human lands, further south even than the House of Nautilus. It was exiled by all Fey Houses, because its founders had done perhaps the most shameful thing possible.

They had interbred with the humans.

And they had paid the price many times over for defiling Fey ways — with their exile, yes, but also worse. Some of that punishment came from the hand of my own people. My own father.

“We cannot visit an exiled nation,” I said.

“What’s stopping us?” Caduan replied. “What reason is there?”

“Exile is permanent, and all-encompassing,” Ishqa said. “By going among them, we defile ourselves.”

I had never seen Caduan show anger before. And even now, it happened slowly, as if bubbling up beneath the surface of an ice-covered lake.

“That is what the humans hold over us,” he said, quietly. “Ingenuity. Adaptability. They learn how to erase their weaknesses. Meanwhile, we’ll cling to our symbolic traditions as we watch our own people fall. How far away are any of us from heretic magic? Your people were never intended to half-shift. You learned how to do that. The gods did not give that to you. Is that, too, heretical?”

A wrinkle twitched over the bridge of Ishqa’s nose. “Our traditions are all we have. If we abandon them, then we are saving nothing at all.”

“Nothing? We are saving lives. Do you think I care at all about my House’s traditions? Our pointless rules? I would trade all of those things and more to have the souls I lost that day back. And if you say otherwise, then you either lack a brain or a heart.”

Ishqa’s eyebrows arched. Ashraia looked as if he were actively holding himself back from decking the king across the face. I had to bite back a gasp, even as I also nursed a twinge of admiration.

How easy it was, for Caduan to discard the weight of society. Every day, I felt it biting into my skin like chafing ropes, reminding me of exactly what I was and what I could never be. Every second of my life was defined by it. And yet, to Caduan, it was inconsequential.

Caduan’s gaze flicked to me. The green of his eyes seemed brighter, somehow, with the intensity of his fury.

He simply said, “Aefe?” and I was struck, yet again, by the way he said my name.

I was silent.

Perhaps a part of me thought he was right. But that was the part that I spent my whole life choking back — the part that railed against the confines of my blood, that hated my father for discarding me just as much as I loved and admired him. I did not let that part of myself out of its box. And certainly not here,